When marginalized individuals don’t say what we predict they need to

The late Saba Mahmood’s 2004 The Politics of Piety is an excellent instance of the right way to do philosophical ethnography. The ebook’s one flaw is its dense prose fashion, however even that will have been vital so as to persuade its audience: 2000s-era postmodern feminists, who tended to take six-syllable phrases as an indication of profundity. And whereas the everyday vocabulary has modified considerably within the many years since she wrote it – from “resistance” and “company” to “privilege” and “marginalization” – the sorts of views she is critiquing stay very widespread, and her critique has misplaced none of its energy.

Mahmood is learning the da’wah piety motion amongst Egyptian Muslim girls, together with practices like sporting the veil. Different feminist students had studied such girls earlier than. However these students had insisted in defining their informants’ actions within the students’ phrases reasonably than the informants’:

A few of these research provide functionalist explanations, citing a wide range of explanation why girls tackle the veil voluntarily (for instance, the veil makes it straightforward for ladies to keep away from sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the price of apparel for working girls, and so forth). Different research establish the veil as an emblem of resistance to the commodification of ladies’s our bodies within the media, and extra typically to the hegemony of Western values. Whereas these research have made essential contributions, it’s shocking that their authors have paid so little consideration to Islamic virtues of feminine modesty or piety, particularly on condition that lots of the girls who’ve taken up the veil body their choice exactly in these phrases. As a substitute, analysts typically clarify the motivations of veiled girls when it comes to customary fashions of sociological causality (corresponding to social protest, financial necessity, anomie, or utilitarian technique), whereas phrases like morality, divinity, and advantage are accorded the standing of the phantom imaginings of the hegemonized. (16)

As philosophers, no less than, we may moderately argue that ladies are mistaken to put on the veil within the identify of morality and divinity. However I agree with Mahmood that we do a disservice as anthropologists after we keep away from portraying them as thinking about morality and divinity, and as a substitute painting them as engaged in acts of resistance – as a result of resistance is one thing we’re extra thinking about.

We WEIRD individuals love to outline everybody’s lives when it comes to political energy relationships – oppression, resistance, privilege. Postcolonialist students beloved doing that in Mahmood’s day, and twenty years later that paradigm has grow to be accepted within the in style tradition and all through our establishments (as when the US Nationwide Public Radio describes range and racial fairness as its inner “North Star”). What we not often appear to do is think about whether or not this paradigm is shared by the individuals it’s supposed to assist. It often seems that it isn’t – even in our personal nations. (Most US Latinos assume that unlawful migration from Mexico is a main downside or perhaps a disaster; not like the white liberal People who help slicing police funding, black People need extra police of their neighbourhoods.) They produce other issues to fret about, as Mahmood acknowledges of her personal informants:

it is very important level out that to investigate individuals’s actions when it comes to realized or pissed off makes an attempt at social transformation is essentially to scale back the heterogeneity of life to the reasonably flat narrative of succumbing to or resisting relations of domination. Simply as our personal lives don’t match neatly into such a paradigm, neither ought to we apply such a discount to the lives of ladies like Nadia and Sana, or to actions of ethical reform such because the one mentioned right here. (174)

On this mild, evaluate Mahmood’s work to the far inferior work of Joseph Cheah. Like Mahmood, Cheah was interviewing a gaggle usually thought-about marginalized: poor Burmese immigrants to California. Additionally like her, he finds that they don’t consider their lives when it comes to marginalization and resistance. However the place Mahmood takes this as a motive to probe deeper and discover the methods by which they do perceive their lives, Cheah takes it as an event to inform them they’re mistaken! He confidently proclaims that his informants’ view is “the neoconservative stereotype of Asian People because the mannequin minority”, “none aside from internalization of the prevailing ideology of white supremacy”. We hear extra about Cheah’s personal self-righteous judgements of the immigrants than we hear of the immigrants’ personal voices themselves. I’m unsure I’ve ever seen a greater instance of how to not do anthropology.

Mahmood, in contrast, exhibits a real curiosity towards her informants, letting them communicate with an impartial voice. She admits there was a “repugnance that usually swelled up inside me towards the mosque motion, particularly those who appeared to circumscribe girls’s subordinate standing inside Egyptian society” – and but, admirably, she took a deep breath and continued to pay attention additional, recognizing that the ladies would possibly but have one thing to show us:

Critique, I consider, is strongest when it leaves open the likelihood that we’d even be remade within the technique of partaking one other’s worldview, that we’d come to study issues that we didn’t already know earlier than we undertook the engagement. This requires that we often flip the crucial gaze upon ourselves, to depart open the likelihood that we could also be remade by means of an encounter with the opposite. (16-17)

Mahmood, that’s, rightly sees the attraction of the unappealing. I’ve argued for a very long time that the philosophical concepts we study essentially the most from will appear repugnant to us at first, and we actually study by persevering. Mahmood works to makes the identical transfer in ethnography: allow us to attempt to see others as they see themselves, even when we don’t like what we see, and perhaps we are going to study extra about ourselves within the course of.